New York on Ice Skating in the City

From frozen ponds to Madison Square Garden, ice-skating has become a quintessentially New York pastime, woven into the city’s urban fabric in ways large and small. Explore how ice-skating evolved in the city from its colonial Dutch and British origins to become a 19th-century craze, and later an opportunity for elaborate spectacle, commercialized leisure, and competitive sport in the 20th century and beyond. See vintage photographs, posters, lithographs, paintings, and costumes that reveal the evolution of the sport and art of ice-skating in the city both as a window into a passion and pastime of generations of New Yorkers, and as an unexpected ingredient of urban place-making.